Re: Difficult language ideas

Oh, I just remembered the posting limit. It's 5 in a day, I think? I
will combine a few posts here and respond to more tomorrow, then.

On 9/19/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Leigh Richards writes:
> >...
> > Design goals:
> >...
>
> I'd add gender to enable you to encode lexical distinctions in the
> gender agreement somewhere else in the sentence, when the nouns are
> homophonous.  The same could be done with plurale tantum words what
> happend to sound exactly like the singular of another word and are
> made unambigous only be agreement effects.
Oh, I like this! I hadn't thought of that.

(snip a lot)

> Semantical correctness aside, the gender of 'Schwanz' or 'Norm'
> determines the meaning on 'Finne' here.  Which I think is quite an
> obfuscation.  If it was the norm in German, even more people would
> hate to learn it. :-)
Perfect :)


On 9/19/06, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 10:03:06AM -0400, Leigh Richards wrote:
> > Design goals:
> > 1. As unambiguous as possible, especially in full sentences; it's easy
> > to clarify any ambiguities.
>
> This is rather difficult to do and still be naturalistic (providing
> that's a goal, of course). You could make things such that sentences may
> sometimes be ambiguous, but there is always a way to completely
> disambiguate (e.g., by including optional specifiers that clarify the
> meaning, where such specifiers may sound verbose or burdensome when the
> audience already knows enough context to infer the right meaning.)
Yes, I'm sure there will be some of that. They will want to minimize
it, though.

(snip)

> As for small changes having large impact on the meaning, maybe introduce
> a lot of idioms and idiosyncrasies which requires a lot of cultural
> background to correctly infer the meaning of?
Hmm. That gives me an idea. It isn't a language likely to develop many
idioms, but it could very well have taken idioms from various
languages throughout the years and turned them to its own purposes. I
like that.

(snip)

> What are some of the ideas you have? It'll be fun to discuss them.
I'm still in the brainstorming phase, and my ideas have been pretty
general so far.

As far as phonology, there will be sounds unused and/or non-phonemic
in the normal languages, maybe some complex rules for sandhi, possibly
overlapping to an extent. I haven't thought it out, but there's
something about Aymara's vowel elision that wants me to work it in in
a non-intuitive way.

I think there will be word and affix order that is both free and
important in subtle ways to the meaning as a whole. On a word level,
wide use of compounds that don't make sense if you break them apart
into their constituents, and easily confused words where sound and
meaning are both similar. Mutations, since the normal languages are
mostly agglutinative. Noun classes, maybe, that aren't easy to guess
from the word or its meaning (Henrik's comments are perfect with
this). Subtle things like the exact form (or lack of) agreement
changing the meaning in various ways. In general, a lot of
idiosyncratic things.

There will probably be deliberate obfuscations too. They don't want
people to know what they're saying unless they already know the
language. Idioms translated literally from other languages will work
well here. Perhaps certain things that always depend on previous
context, and others that can never do so. On a similar note, the
writing system will be deliberately ambiguous, and take a lot of
context to even begin to understand.

I'll take elements from the normal languages and twist them too, but
that assumes I know what those elements are... and I don't, yet.
Quechua is my baseline when I'm thinking about this, though they
aren't derivative languages. Some meanings that are 'reversed' (like
you mentioned above in your Russian examples) from the way the normal
languages there do it would be good.

I go back and forth about adding tones, but I'm not sure that it would
occur to them to do that. I can get around that last if I really want
to, but it begins to strike me as adding in the kitchen sink at that
point.

I haven't thought as much about non-ambiguity.

> > Suggestions? Things to include? Things to avoid?
> [...]
>
> What about an unusual syntax/typology that is internally consistent but
> very strange relative to known natlang typologies? Such as...
>
> <shameless plug>
> ... the Tatari Faran case system, which has no concept of subject or
> object, but marks nouns with one of three cases according to semantic
> relationship with the verb:
>         http://conlang.eusebeia.dyndns.org/fara/cases.html
> </shameless plug>
Shameless plugs are good :) That's cool. I'm not sure if they would
think of doing something too different. I'll have to think more about
their history as well. This language originates in a different place
than the normal ones though, so I have some leeway there.

> As for things to avoid... this depends on your tastes (and goals),
> really. I personally dislike languages where every syllable is assigned
> a meaning---using this method it's very easy to make an extremely
> difficult language (e.g., every syllable in a sentence completely
> changes the meaning of all subsequent syllables, so that, for example,
> 'zapukelsu' could mean 'I like the little dog' but 'zepukelsu' means
> 'There will be a thunderstorm tomorrow'). The problem with this is that
> a little background noise completely annuls any consistency in
> communication.
I'm not too concerned with the effects of background noise, but I
don't care for that either. Of course, it could just be that it
violates some internal desire for order and sensibility :)

Thanks!
Leigh

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